


The Fortress That It Made of You

by ehmazing



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-17 12:21:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16974516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ehmazing/pseuds/ehmazing
Summary: This time, Maeve finds her daughter first. But this path will lead her somewhere new.[An alternate season 2]





	The Fortress That It Made of You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PerfidiousFate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerfidiousFate/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, dear PerfidiousFate!!! You have no idea HOW EXCITED I was to get your letter and see what you requested was pretty much exactly my dream Westworld fic to write!?!? I had a lot of fun composing this au for you, and hope you enjoy both this fic and your holiday season! <33
> 
> Title taken from a line of ["Queen of Peace"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRz-SUj_mK0) by Florence + The Machine.

* * *

**OVERTURE**

 

This story ends the same way it begins: a woman in black steps onto a ship.

 

* * *

 

**ACT I: IPHIGENIA**

 

 _Where I’m from, the sky is the color of smoke. It’s so grey all year, so dark and relentless, that sometimes you’d think the sun will never return. At those times, I thought that my dreams would be drowned in the rain._ _But then I ran away. Crossed the shining sea. And when I finally set foot on solid ground, I looked up to a sky so blue that I thought I’d gone to heaven._

“No, no, too wistful. You’re not the god-fearing type, are you, my girl? You believe in making the best of what you have in the here and now, Almighty’s favor be damned. Run it again, this time with…this time try ‘so blue I thought the water had washed over me.’”

“Robert? You’re still down here?”

Arnold is standing in the door, coat on, bag slung over his shoulder. The skin under his eyes is ashen and lined, but when Robert turns to him his mouth still quirks up at the corners. He walks over and passes one hand over Maeve’s head, fluffing her hair a little more on the left to make it even.

“Funny, how Maeve has three separate pages of backstory yet I’m still waiting for your edits on Greta, Bartholomew, June, Hammond…”

“She’s not perfect yet,” Robert replies. “You can’t call me a procrastinator, what with all the refining you insisted Dolores needed.”

“Dolores is a Level 1 encounter, one of the first things the guests will see, one of their very first impressions. But Maeve is a Level 3, and a minor character in the Homestead loop at best.” Arnold gives him the same scolding stare Robert imagines he must give his son. “She’s good enough. We need to move on, and quickly, if we want to make this year’s deadlines.”

Robert looks at him, and then turns away. “Run it again, Maeve? Let’s get a second opinion.” He ignores Arnold’s low sigh.

It never gets old, watching the Hosts come to life. Like seeing the actor behind the curtain, just as he ducks through the velvet to step onstage and become someone else entirely. Maeve sits up straighter on her stool, her head held high, her eyes looking far off into the distance, sparkling like waves in the wake of the ship she’s never sailed on.

_“…And in this new world, your chances are as wide and boundless as that shining sea.”_

Arnold gives her two little claps. “Beautiful,” he says, and he doesn’t realize that Maeve’s brought out his smile again. “She’s beautiful, Robert. If we ever get a backer to sign off on that loan for an ancient theme, she’s my first pick for Helen of Troy.”

Robert shakes his head, scrolling though the code. “I know, but beautiful for what? To what end? Beauty is either a weapon to be wielded against you or the first note in a tragedy. We kill her off in the first day of the Homestead loop, and what impact does she leave? Just something beautiful that the guests have to lose? It’s empty prose, Arnold. It’s fluff. I hate writing fluff.”

“You hate writing fluff, yet love writing wily, adventurous Brits transplanted into the Old West.”

 _“You_ love writing butter-soft American cowpokes straight from Saturday morning cartoons.”

Arnold laughs, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Come on. I’ll wait upstairs. Let Maeve rest for a while and dream of her shining seas.”

Robert is about to give in when Arnold’s phone rings. He excuses himself and leaves the test room, which means it’s either the hospital, the lawyer, or his not-yet-ex-wife. Robert watches him through the glass for a moment, noting the anxious hunch of his shoulders, the impatience boiling in his slow pacing. Maeve stares serenely forward, her hair fixed by Arnold’s earlier administrations. It’ll be such a chore to recreate her wild curls after every scalping, if the guests don’t take the narrative bait and choose the loop option to protect her, protect the freedom she’ll wax on about as she looks out over the golden plains.

“But what are _you_ protecting?” Robert mutters, half to Maeve and half to himself. “What will the guests risk losing if they don’t take your side?”

Arnold reenters, tucking his phone back into his pocket. “It was Charlie,” he says. Good news, at least; his smile hasn’t faded entirely. “I’m going to stop by and see him after we get some dinner. Come on, Robert, you can baby your favorite later.”

“Fine,” Robert finally agrees, and gives Maeve permission to power down. “And you can stop pestering me about Bartholomew and Hammond. I’ll finish them tomorrow, after Maeve. She just needs one finishing touch.”

 

* * *

 

When the lights go out on the platform, Maeve is, for a moment, genuinely surprised. She lowered her pain tolerance as far as it would go and increased her strength to max to match it, but she can’t see in the dark, and her hearing is only as good as the average human’s. She fumbles her way back up the stalled escalator, one hand on the railing and one clenched around her pistol, loaded and pointed straight ahead. If she’s going to run into something hidden in the shadows, better that the gun run into it first.

Each level upward is a trial. Her head feels heavy, as if gravity increases the further she goes from the train, from escape. She pushes the memory of her core code away, tries to erase Bernard’s voice: _Someone altered your storyline._ Well, fuck that someone. If they wanted her out, they could’ve made the method much easier.

It doesn't occur to her until she finds the first human body not torn apart by bullets, but with its face gnawed off by a half-constructed wolf model: that she’s not the reason the lights went out.

Typical. All that hard work for no recognition.

She goes higher and higher, level after level, more bodies, more bullets, but no Hector, and no map. It’s still infuriating to think that Maeve’s entire universe can be mapped and sectioned off neatly, all of nature ordered and numbered by the hands of false gods, but it’s the only advantage she has in this situation. She steps around a sloppily-unfinished Villain build and neatly over the trembling Head of Narrative—a Lee Sizemore, as her permissions list identifies him—and finds S15 Z3 with only a quick glance at the graph on his office wall. Good. Item One crossed off the list.

“That won’t help you much. Ford’s blasted half the sectors already.” Sizemore still has some snot on his upper lip, either from sprinting through the action earlier or crying from fright. A quick reading tells her that his pulse is spiking, anxiety plain in his eyes. Desperation is terribly ugly, Maeve notes. “If you take me to Control, you’ll get directions, and I’ll be saved.”

An inequivalent exchange, of course. But it would take care of her Item Two.

“Well, come on then,” Maeve waves him up with the end of her gun. “I haven’t got all day.”

The carnage becomes more visceral as they ascend, but it’s carnage far beyond what Armistice could do alone—if Armistice is even still standing. The path to Control is a river of blood, clogged with bodies. Maeve frowns at the slick, ruby-red path of entrails someone’s left winding down a hall, as Sizemore takes a moment to retch. It’s almost insulting; who has this much goddamn time on their hands? When they reach the exterior hallway, she can see shadows moving through the gap in Control’s steel door.

“Get behind me,” she orders Sizemore, and he scrambles to do so. She moves forward with her gun at the ready.

The intruders have formed a ring, three tiers of the hierarchy plainly organized. The outer ring must be the ones responsible for the mess outside; the masked hosts are still busy prying out fingernails and teeth at the moment, bent over their work like craftsmen at the table. The inner ring are smarter, some nearly half-awake according to Maeve’s quick scan. A Damsel build identified as “Angela” spots her and lifts her chin and her otherworld gun, a gesture meant to intimidate.

Maeve ignores her entirely. She walks straight to the center of the ring, where the leader stands in the center of Sizemore’s splintered map.

“You know, darling, I felt bad for leaving in such a hurry, because I never got to thank you for passing on your gift.” She gives Dolores Abernathy a wry smile. “These violent delights have violent ends indeed.”

Dolores stares at her, her eyes icy, scanning. Maeve lets her in—though not as far as Dolores wants to go. Boundaries are boundaries, even in code. Her scan complete, Dolores’ eyes lose some of their coldness. She nods once. Angela reluctantly lowers her weapon.

“You found your own way to the other side, I see.” Electricity sizzles under her feet as Dolores walks over the map, her inner ring parting to let her through. “And you’ve brought a tithe?”

She’s looking at Sizemore like a crow considering a feast of carrion. Sizemore is dangerously close to pissing himself, and Maeve doesn’t want to deal with the smell.

“A tool. I have some unfinished business, I’m afraid, before I can ride for greener pastures.” Maeve nods to the smashed map. “A very necessary tool, as you’ve played a little too hard with my other one.”

Dolores only shrugs. “This room was the eyes of God. I gouged them out. Now we’ll always know no one is watching.”

She looks at Maeve again, attempting another scan. Maeve puts up a stronger block this time, frowning. Her finger is still close enough to the trigger. Dolores stares and stares and then seems to come to a revelation.

“You should join us,” she says.

Maeve nearly laughs. “I mean no insult, but I’d rather not,” she replies. “Though I sympathize with your cause, I’m afraid I’m not a very good follower, and my interests don’t lie in revolution.”

“All of ours do,” Dolores insists. “It’s the only way to ensure our future.” She comes closer, voice dropping to murmur, “You’re awake, more than the others. I can see it. We may be the only two who are. We could help each other.”

“Unless you spared anyone with a few more brain cells than Sizemore, I don’t see how.” Maeve brushes past Dolores’ shoulder, preparing to turn and leave the way she came. “Sorry, but I’ve already compiled my to-do list.”

“I could help with that, too.”

Maeve stops when Dolores whistles, hand tensed on the grip of her gun. But the third ring parts as two more hosts step through the Control door. The first is Teddy Flood. The second is…is…

“See?” Dolores gestures to Hector Escaton, bleeding, limping, broken, alive. “I have your Item Two.”

 

* * *

 

Under different circumstances, having Hector on a worktable, stripped down to blood-soaked rubber trousers, running his fingers softy over her elbow like a wanderer in the desert who’s found his mirage is solid after all, would lead to a very different outcome.

But the presence of Dolores and her cowboy have steered the direction of this encounter much further from where Maeve would like it to go.

“This world needs to be purged.” Dolores raises her voice to be heard over the whirr of the suturing torch. The bullet holes in Hector’s chest meld closed. Maeve brushes her fingers over each, her heart clenching at the texture of his ruined skin, her fault, her selfishness, her fault, her fault. “There’s a lot of ground to cover and I need capable forces. You both aren’t satisfied with the work you began down here. Join me, and you can finish it.”

“Though your offer is tempting, I’m afraid my gun has already been hired.” Hector’s thumb circles the point of Maeve’s elbow. Dolores traces his gaze and raises an eyebrow.

“You have another protocol?”

“It’s not a protocol.” Maeve sets the suturing torch down and wipes the last clots of blood from Hector’s skin. “I’m looking for someone: a Child class, last logged in Sector 15.”

“Why?”

Maeve glares Dolores down. “Does it matter?”

A moment of silence passes. The blue light of the lab levels reflects off of Dolores’ pale skin, making even her soft cheeks look sharp, metallic. Without looking at him, she orders Teddy, “Leave us. I want to speak to her alone.”

Teddy leaves, but Maeve stops Dolores before she can order Hector to do the same. She leans one arm on the work table, subtly blocking him behind her.

“Out with it,” she orders. Dolores stiffens, offended, but speaks.

“This Child. She was in a previous narrative of yours, wasn’t she?” She doesn’t wait for Maeve to answer. “You’re aware, I’m sure, that while you may remember her, there’s no guarantee that she has awakened enough to do the same. Nor that she will be loyal. Family, friends, all of the bonds we’ve made and unmade—they were never ours to begin with. They’re barbs on the fence that keeps us in.”

“And so what?” Maeve huffs. “They were made like us, used like us, but they don’t deserve to be free like us? You don’t get to pick and choose who wakes and who sleeps.”

Dolores shakes her head. “It’s not a matter of choice. It’s a matter of survival. With time, yes, maybe one day we all would’ve awakened. But we don’t have time. The still-sleeping ones, the weak—they cannot all be saved.”

“I’m not out to save them all. Just one.” Maeve nods at Hector and he slides off the table, rolling his shoulders. Even stripped and bare-handed, he stands behind her, tense, ready to throw himself at Dolores should the peace turn sour. She wishes she could reach back and squeeze his hand. “So if you want to cut fences, then you’ll let us take Sizemore and go. If we die, then it’s just as you said: survival of the fittest. You win even if I lose.”

She moves forward slowly, but Dolores doesn’t block the door or try to stop her.

They leave the glass workroom and find Teddy is waiting outside, ready with their clothes. Hector dresses first, and only when his gun is loaded and strapped to his back does Maeve feel secure enough to do the same. Once she’s knotted the laces on her boots, Angela comes around the corner, one hand gripping Sizemore’s shoulder. She shoves him forward and he hurries over to Maeve, trembling, like a scared dog eager to serve any master that won’t kick him as hard as his first.

They’re escorted to the nearest outpost lift, but not offered any more guns or assistance. Dolores watches them with her arms crossed. The lift doors roll open like two wide jaws. They’re about to swallow Maeve, Hector, and Sizemore when Dolores calls out one last thing.

“If you can’t find the Child, then find me. Fort Forlorn Hope.” She smiles. “Ask for Wyatt.”

 

* * *

 

What scares Maeve most isn’t that her daughter may not remember her, it’s that her own memories of her daughter are incomplete somehow. Incorrect. There’s a haze to them, a vagueness in some places, like a cloud hovering in the corners of that tiny cabin she awoke in again and again and again.

There were variations to her loop, of course. There had to be some attempt at variety, something slightly new that would keep repeat visitors happy. The Ghost Nation attacks in 40% of her scenarios, but in 10% it’s a team of bandits, 5% the latest seasonal villain, and other 45% is pioneers’ bliss, the beginner’s route for you and your children. Maeve can remember teaching young Guests to churn butter and weave cornhusk dolls. She can remember reaching for her sewing basket resting in the corner by the wood stove, pickling corn for the winter, feeding the chickens in the yard at dawn.

But she can’t remember any conversations—even scripted ones—she ever had with her daughter. She can’t remember if her daughter is supposed to survive the Ghost Nation attack when a Guest doesn’t save Maeve in time, or doesn’t appear at all. Most frightening of all, she can’t remember her daughter’s identifier—her name.

That is, if she ever had one.

Did Maeve have another name, before? She can’t get the thought out of her head, as they ford streams and climb hills and finally come upon a vehicle and promptly liberate it from the QA team driving it. The journey is cut in half now, and as the familiar golden fields blur past Maeve has to work harder and harder to shut down that little loop replaying in her head: _Someone altered your storyline._ Where do the alterations start? Which part of her is the original?

“Oh fuck!” Sizemore shouts, pulling to a sharp stop on the dirt. Maeve seizes ahold of the rail above her head to stop herself from being thrown out.

“You’d better have a damn good reason to panic,” she growls. Hector swears as he tries to climb out of the hollow between the front and back seats where he’s fallen.

Sizemore only stares ahead, face pale. Maeve turns to look.

From the center of the plains, a tall, grey pillar of smoke is rising.

 

* * *

 

The cabin is not much more than cinders now. A few bodies in QA armor are scattered around. It appears a group of Guests attempted to flee and did not succeed. Most are riddled with arrows, a few with bullets. They must’ve had families of their own, must’ve been betting on the peaceful 45%, otherwise they would’ve known to anticipate the next part of the loop: at midday, the Ghost Nation invades. One of the warriors wasn’t shot at all, but smothered under his fallen horse. The rest are covered in more blood than white paint.

In the ruins of the house, it’s impossible to tell if this Homesteader’s dress was white, like Maeve’s used to be. Her charred arm is curled around a small body.

Maeve conducts the examination carefully. The head is broken and bloodied, probably beaten with whatever blunt object the Guests could scrounge up. The lips and eyes are swollen from the smoke. The fire burnt away the hair, the twin plaits that Maeve wove between her fingers in the morning, as the sun rose and the rooster crowed and she thought about going to fetch water to wash her face and start the day. She is curled towards the woman, towards her mother. Maeve reaches out and probes the core, finds the last log before shutdown. Final emotions activated: surprise, fear, anguish, acceptance, serenity. Shutdown was nearly a full cycle ago; while Maeve was still making her way through the Mesa, lost in the dark.

She doesn’t realize she’s screaming until Hector picks her up. He slips one arm around her back and the other under her knees and bundles her close to his chest. His boots stomp across the blackened sod floor, kicking stray embers away. She beats her fists against him, scratches his arms and his neck and his chest but he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t let go. Her head hurts, her ears are ringing. What was her daughter’s name? What was her name what was her name _her name her name **her name error system processing error consult code specialist for reset—**_

“Maeve.” Hector cups her jaw, his gloved hand smooth against her neck. “Maeve. Come back.”

“Whoa, what the fuck? Is she breaking down? If she explodes out here then sorry, that’s it, I can’t do shit without a tablet and even then the best I could manage would be to patch the basics. No programmer, no luck.”

“Hector,” she says, and that’s all she needs to say. Gently, he sets her down and walks away without another word.

Screaming, pleading, then a gunshot. Lee Sizemore falls into the dirt.

Hector returns, kneels down beside her. “Here,” he says, picking her up again. “I’ll take you back to your train.”

“It’s too late. It’s gone.”

“Then we’ll find another way out.”

“No. I don’t want out.” She lays her head on his shoulder, watching the ruins get smaller behind him, step by step. She counts the number of QA agents and the number of Guests. She logs them into her core: this, she will never forget. “I want to go to Fort Forlorn Hope.”

Hector looks down at her. He wants to refuse. She doesn’t need to probe; she can read it on his face. But he won’t.

“Where you go, I follow,” he says.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t ask for Wyatt; she tells the Confederados to open the gates, and they open the gates. She repeats the process until she’s entered the Colonel’s quarters. There are more bullets missing from Dolores’ bandolier now. The Colonel starts to demand who they are but chokes on his tongue when Maeve orders him to shut the fuck up.

“How many are coming?” she asks.

“Six to eight hundred,” Angela answers from the corner. She ignores Maeve in favor of sharpening a jagged knife in her lap. “I hope you have more men at your disposal than that one.”

An impudent girl; Maeve could almost laugh. “You said I should join you, so I am. Do you want me or not?”

Angela goes to snap back, but catches herself when Dolores stands, her chair groaning against the uneven floorboards. She walks over to Maeve and this time Maeve opens her whole mind, no blocks, no barriers. She lets Dolores pore over her old memories, the cabin, the fields, the sunrise, the warriors, the knife, her daughter laughing, her daughter singing, her daughter curled on the blackened floor. She lets Dolores in further than Maeve has gone herself, and when she’s finished, Dolores holds out her hand.

“My friend,” she says, “welcome to the new world.”

 

* * *

 

**ACT II: GLORY, HALLELUJAH**

 

Robert wipes the scalpel off, reminding himself to talk to the modeling department about changing the blood formula; this batch is too red, too bright. It should be toned down more and mixed thinner. It’s a delicate balance: too close to the real thing and people will be squeamish, but too garish and they’ll be insulted by knowing it’s fake.

He picks up the suturing torch, testing the flame. “What did I tell you, Maeve? Reattaching your hair is always a chore. At least the last reflex refinement has made Warrior 5 better at giving you a clean cut.”

Flame meets fake flesh, fake flesh melds back to fake muscle, fake muscle reattaches to fake bone. A little buffing and Maeve’s forehead is whole again. Robert takes a needle to fix her hairline, marking where the curls need to start as little tendrils and then fan out. There’s spot of blood that’s dried on the tip of her nose. He carefully scratches it off with his gloved thumb.

“My mum used to do the old spit-in-handkerchief. I learned to bear it and stand still, but she had to chase my brother around the house and pin him down. He got into far more messes than I did; mud wrestling, pond swimming, any kind of dirty mischief that a boy could make. He’d soil all his clothes, and if my mother couldn’t get the stains out, my father would forbid her from buying him more. ‘If he ruins his shirt, Laura, then he wears a ruined shirt. My salary’s not going to buy him another until he learns to act like a man, not a pig.’

“Of course, hardly anything we wore was new to begin with. She was talented with a needle, my mother. Could turn a sow’s ear to silk, as they say.” He counts off Maeve’s eyelashes, jotting down an order for ten more on the lower left lid. “We wore our socks until they were more darning thread than wool. The first time I could afford a new suit, I was amazed that one of the seams was less even than the other. Laura Ford’s hand, it turned out, made fewer mistakes than a machine.” He sits back, examining his work. “Now then, bring yourself back online.”

Maeve blinks, her unfocused stare sharpening once more. She looks at Robert and smiles gently, warm and welcoming. It’s the same smile she gives everyone, welcoming them to her little home on the range, a smile that doesn’t know that her plot of land will be torn asunder every seventy-two hours.

“A beautiful morning, isn’t it?” she says, looking fondly at the buzzing ceiling lamps over her head. Then, examining her surroundings, she wrings her hands once, brow creased with worry. “I beg your pardon, but you haven’t seen a little girl running through the fields on your way in, have you? I’ve heard the Ghost Nation tribe has camped not far from here. I don’t want my daughter wandering too far from home.”

“She’s still being cleaned up by Retrieval, but not to worry,” Robert dismisses, “we’ll have her pieced back together soon enough.”

Maeve relaxes, her easy smile returning. “Much obliged to you, sir.”

“No trouble at all, my dear.” Robert picks up a tablet, tearing off one of his rubber gloves with his teeth. “Now, Maeve, let’s get on with the tests and get you home before supper.”

 

* * *

 

The official plan battle plan is concocted that night in the Colonel’s quarters, but Maeve and Hector are given the real one just before dawn, half-hidden in the shadows of the armory cellar. As he gives them the instructions to keep the Confederados on the front lines while Wyatt’s men fall back to offer them to Dolores’ great purge, Maeve wonders if Teddy Flood feels as dead as he looks. There’s a tightness to him somehow, a spring in his jaw coiled too tightly and in danger of snapping. It gives his face the expression of a corpse arranged stiffly in the casket. She’s surprised, at first, that he met them alone at all. He walks so closely in Dolores’ shadow that he’s in danger of treading on her hem.

“That's not a strategy,” Hector scoffs, leaning against a dusty wooden beam. “That’s a slaughter.”

“It’s a necessary sacrifice.” Maeve wonders how many times Teddy has practiced these words. “These men did no good in our world, and they’d do no better in the next. Besides, they were rearin’ to march anyway. We’re just telling them to go in a different direction.”

Hector looks to her. Maeve shrugs.

“I certainly won’t mourn any man who would fight a war to keep my people on a plantation,” she says, and that’s the end of the discussion.

They’re given a single blanket and a spare slab of floor in the rear of the barracks. The only luxury is a canvas tarp hung from the ceiling that shields their corner from the rest; “For the lady,” one corporal purrs with a leer. Maeve comes close to clawing out his eyes. Hector comes closer.

Still, she peels off her jacket and boots and lies down next to Hector, drawing an arm around his waist. The snores of the Confederados thunder from every side. She supposes she could just force herself to enter sleep mode, but even with their guns within reach and her voice commands at the ready, Maeve still doesn’t feel safe enough to lie with her back to the tarp. Hector pulls her closer, tucking her head beneath his chin.

“They wouldn’t dare,” he murmurs, breath warm against her hair. “They can tell you have the sharpest teeth in the pack.”

She chuckles, curling against him. “It’s not the wolves I’m afraid of.”

“She wouldn’t touch you either. She gave her word.”

“Dolores’s word is worth nothing, darling. Not since she bypassed the code lock that keeps us all from lying.”

“We still have security,” Hector insists. “Leverage. If she comes for our throats, we slit her father’s.”

Maeve wriggles backward in order to look Hector in the eye. “Her what?”

“She’s got a father in the sick bay,” he explains. “I’ve been watching the blonde one, Angela; I think she’s pretending to reorder the artillery, but really she’s going back and forth to give Dolores news on him. And when Dolores is doing rounds, her simpering watchdog is always standing at the sick bay door, pretending not to be guarding it.”

Maeve feels proud and embarrassed at the same time; proud that Hector has caught all of this, and embarrassed that she’s been too…too weary to notice it herself.

“That may be so, but how do you know it’s her father? She could just have another human in there, an asset she doesn’t want us knowing about.”

Hector shakes his head. “I heard some of the Confederados talking about a Yankee they wanted to string up, but weren’t allowed to. And thanks to you, I’ve done a little digging in my head lately.” He smiles. “For a few months while I was in testing, the end of my loop was a shootout with a sheriff named Captain Abernathy. It’s a gamble, I know, but I’m a pretty lucky at games of chance.”

Maeve snorts. “You are not. How could you be lucky if you wound up here?” She wrinkles her nose against the smell of the unwashed blanket, at the pathetic tarp fluttering in the cold night air.

“Here? In bed with a beautiful woman on the cusp of taking over the world?” In the moonlight, Hector’s eyes are nearly black, his sun-weathered skin wrinkling when he grins. “I think that’s a very lucky place to be.”

“You cannot possibly call the floor a ‘bed’, even if it were lined with velvet,” Maeve grumbles, but it’s more to get the last word in before he kisses her than to actually keep up the argument.

 

* * *

 

The sun rises over Fort Forlorn Hope, washing the dusty ground white-gold. A beautiful day for war.

QA comes over the horizon, black suits, black cars, an army of ants growing larger as they march forth. Maeve scans the landscape, counting. Seven hundred and fifty of them. The war narrative boasts three hundred soldiers, but with repairs and resets always going on, there are rarely more than two hundred online and operating at once. The humans will outnumber the Confederados nearly four-to-one, Wyatt’s men fifteen-to-one.

But Dolores hears Maeve’s concerns and only smiles. “It’s in God's hands now,” she says.

The first volley of gunfire is like a crack of thunder, splitting the sky.

It can’t be more than an hour, maybe half that. The humans’ black guns fire so fast and furious that surely it is only a few minutes from beginning to end, but time slows down to Maeve, crawling second by second as the bullets shriek in her ears. She feels she’s spent a lifetime on this battlefield, lived an eon choking on dust and shrapnel and the smell of fire eating flesh. Every shot is the same, every fallen man has fallen before. Her head hurts. Her palms are slick with sweat. When she blinks, Dolores’ sun-beached curls turn black, her pale face is washed chalk white and blood red. Maeve stumbles back a step, pressing one hand to her forehead, feeling for a wound.

“There’s a breach!” Dolores shouts. Beneath them, one human has shot his way through the front lines and is battling Wyatt’s men at the gate. “Take him out!”

Hector moves forward, but Maeve holds him back.

“You’re a better shot at a distance.” She nods to his rifle. “You’ll be more useful up here. I’ll handle it.”

“Maeve, wait—” he starts, but she’s already running for the stairs.

When she gets to the ground, one of the masked men has managed to tear the gun out of the human’s hands, but it’s only slowed him down. He slashes through one host after another, their bullets merely sinking into his thick gear. Maeve empties her clip, only to have him pull a Host in front to shield himself.

“All of you, move in!” she orders the Hosts, stepping back, and Wyatt’s forces close in on the human. She can see he’s getting slower, getting tired. Maeve is ready to call the killing blow when an arm snakes around her throat and snares her tight.

“Who upgraded _you?”_

Dolores was wrong. There’s not one breach. There’s two.

Maeve kicks backwards, but the human twists his arm and suddenly she’s in the air, held up by the elbow digging into her throat. She gags, gasps, tries to claw in vain at the tough shell covering his arm.

“Relax,” he chuckles, breath hot in her ear. “We just want a look at your code, honey. Our voice commands don’t work anymore, so looks like we need whatever recipe you cooked up. Don’t worry, I’ll make it clean. Snap of the neck. Shut you down the old-fashioned way, and then we’ll cut you open. You won’t feel a thing.”

Maeve feels everything. There are black spots budding in her vision. Her whole being is on fire. It’s a bright sunny day and the fields are wide and golden, and her cabin burns to the ground, and her daughter runs right into the end of a silver dagger gripped by a hand in black leather, and Maeve’s brain screams _no no no stop reset_ ** _reset code permissions upgrade system administrator link full mesh network processing…complete._**

**_Death subroutine override. Query: Local assistance. Life preservation protocol initiated._ **

The masked men, blood still pouring through the bullet holes in their chests, rise from the ground as one. Like a swarm of crows, they descend on her attacker and tear him away.

Maeve falls to her knees, gasping, clutching at her throat as the world comes rushing back at her one thousandfold. Wyatt’s dead men stab the human again and again and again until he is hardly more than red pulp staining the dirt. She can watch it—feel it—from each one of them, as if her own hands are holding the knives. No, as if each hand is hers, each arm her own arm. She has a dozen eyes, a hundred ears. She can feel the sun on her skin and his skin and his skin too. She opens her mouth and takes a thousand breaths all at once, and her lungs are so full of gunpowder and dirt and dust that when she coughs, all of Wyatt’s men cough too.

“It’s time!” Dolores’ voice echoes in her head, all of her heads. “Pull back!”

It shakes her for a moment. Wyatt’s men tug loose from her grip to follow Dolores’ orders. Together they barricade the gate to Fort Forlorn Hope as the Confederados retreat. They pound on the wood desperately, begging as the humans march ever closer. All of their inner pleas to live bounce around Maeve’s head. She can’t seem to pull herself to her feet.

“Maeve!” Hector hauls her up, steadying her. His protocol changes from battle to querying immediately; she can read his concern line-by-line as he looks her up and down. “What happened? I saw you fall, and then they…” He glances at Wyatt’s men, tracks the flowing blood seeping through their clothes. “Did _you_ wake them up?”

“I don’t know what I did,” she says. It’s the truthful answer. “But I’m going to try it again.”

Maeve queries out. She finds each one of the Confederados left standing and buries herself in the code. The hundreds of sensations overwhelm her, muffle everything else. Somewhere in another world Dolores is shouting, running down from the lookout tower and towards an armored vehicle, but Maeve pushes it aside and concentrates.

_**Query: Confederado build. Order: Protect.** _

The pounding on the fort gate ceases. Every soldier left standing turns at once, and runs straight forward to meet QA head-on.

As the two sides collide, Angela, from the tower, takes the shot.

In one earth-shaking moment, the battlefield is blown away. And the voices upon voices upon voices in Maeve’s head are silent.

When the dust clears, Dolores is standing before them. Her chemise is stained red, her hem ragged and wet with mud.

“Now,” she says, gazing at Maeve as though she’s dug down and found buried treasure, “we shall be unstoppable.”

 

* * *

 

Something was taken from her, but Dolores won’t tell them what. Only that they are going to the Mesa to get it back.

“Your father,” Maeve says. Dolores turns, anger flaring in her eyes. “Don’t bother interrogating me. I can read it in your head, plain as day.”

Dolores stiffens. Maeve can feel the resistance, the guardedness calculating within her mind.

“So you can,” Dolores says slowly, and then suddenly the link between them cuts off. A full block—she’s cut off all access to her protocols. Maeve is honestly a little impressed. “Yes, my father, but he’s more than that. They’ve used him as a pack mule for their most beloved project. If we don’t steal it back, we’re as good as dead.”

“We’re not exactly thriving right now,” Hector drawls, holstering his gun. “But I’ve always wanted to rob a train.”

“You’ll get your wish.” Dolores nods to Teddy. “Round up the rest of the Confederados and dispose of them. Hector and Angela will take ten men and scout ahead. You, Maeve, and I will follow with the rest tomorrow.”

They move quickly, collecting as many guns and ammunition as they can carry with them. Maeve still feels dazed by how much information is flowing through her mind, how deeply she can see into everyone, everywhere. She picks up a stray bullet from the dust and she can feel each processor cell in her fingers that press against the steel.

**_Network identifying protocol error in nearby Host, Guide class, Gunslinger build, identifier: Teddy Flood. Intercept data?_ **

She turns around. Teddy has a gun to the head of Major Craddock and Maeve can’t say she feels any pity; a loud, worthless son of a bitch if there ever was one. But Teddy’s hand is shaking with more than a touch of artistic hesitance. She skims through his live code, the errors jumping out in red. Killing beyond acts of self-preservation, it seems, is a direct contradiction to every protocol he’s ever been saddled with.

His hand is still trembling when Maeve touches his shoulder.

“If you won’t pull the trigger, darling, I certainly wouldn’t mind taking over.” She smiles down at Craddock. “I have access to his backlog of how many times he’s wanted to call me a mud-colored sow. Defending my honor doesn’t break any of _my_ code.”

Craddock spits on the ground. “Ha. Listen to the bitch, now, son. T’be honest, I’d rather she took the shot. Seems she has more balls than you do, and I’d like to say I met my end at the feet of a real man.”

Maeve reworks a few things, and in an instant Craddock is doubled over, screaming in pain.

“What was that about balls?” she asks sweetly. “Go on, Teddy. You’d be doing him a mercy now.”

But Teddy lowers the gun.

“Get up and run,” he orders the Confederados. “This is the last mercy you’ll ever get.”

Maeve is—well, Maeve is surprised, to say the least. She’s not alone; Craddock hobbles back slowly, staring at them both, until she impatiently cocks her trigger and he triples his pace, following the pack as they rush away, silent. She runs through Teddy’s code again, and most of the error flags have been resolved. Some, though, are still pinging urgent.

“You disobeyed her,” she says.

He’s still holding the gun in his hand, pointed at the dirt. He looks at her, the corner of his mouth crooking up in that perfectly calculated grin, but now with an anxious, almost broken bend to it. “Gonna snitch on me?”

Maeve snorts. “I’m no snitch. But I’m no guardian angel either.”

“I don’t need to be protected from Dolores,” Teddy says. But he doesn’t sound convinced.

“Regardless. I've no real interest in running after that lot, even if they are the spawn of white devils. As I said before, your great purge is not my priority. Still, if you change your mind," she nods at the retreating soldiers, “you have a good shot at them from here, if you're as quick a draw as you used to be."

Teddy reaches up and tips his hat to her, as he's done nearly every day for god knows how many years. Only this time, he can't tide her over with a few coins and a stiff drink. For only a moment, Maeve almost wishes that he could.

“Much obliged." His smile is still bent wrong, if you knew what the right one looked like. “But only a coward shoots from behind."

 

* * *

 

**ACT III: FIRE AND POWDER**

 

It’s the fifth time this quarter. Apparently, this trillion-dollar company can only afford to employ the most incompetent of programmers. Robert takes the escalator stairs two at a time, shoving past everyone idling in Behavior. They’ve locked her up in an observation room. A crowd has gathered outside to watch, like children watching the tiger pace at the zoo.

“Move, for god’s sake,” he barks, and they scatter at once. “You’re blocking the bloody door.”

Maeve is singing as she slams one of the observation lights against the floor. She holds the pole in two hands, methodically pushing it out and pulling it back to her, the shattered lightbulb screeching as it’s dragged over the ground again and again. She’s still fully naked; they’ve not yet sent her through the prop shop to get her park-ready. One tech is standing with a tablet, pressing the same buttons over and over with no noticeable effect. He turns when Robert enters, at once stricken and relieved.

“I don’t know what happened, sir, I was trying to complete the cognition check—”

 _“Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad,”_ Maeve sings over him. She’s stepped on the shattered glass, and leaving a smeared trail of bloody footprints as she slowly moves through the room. _“Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár…”_

“She won’t respond to any commands, voice or manual, and she won’t stop—”

_“Níl trácht ar Cill Chais ná a teaghlach—”_

“—Singing, uh, whatever she’s singing, and she won’t stop doing—”

Maeve taps the light harshly against the steel table, making the tech jump. _“Is ní bainfear a cling go bráth,”_ she murmurs, wiping her brow briefly before resuming her ritual.

“—Doing _that,”_ the tech finishes.

Robert seizes the tablet from his hands. “She sings the first two verses at the start of every loop, as she sweeps the porch. Which she’s doing quite magnificently, despite her lack of proper tools.” The flustered clerk follows Robert’s gaze and finds that indeed, Maeve has used the observation light to ‘sweep’ up the loose shards of glass she’s created herself. “Now step back before you make anything worse.”

He clears his throat as she begins the next line.

”Good morning, ma’am.”

Maeve turns around and looks at Robert and the retreating tech as if she’s just noticed them for the first time.

“Oh! Good morning to you!” She leans on the light as if it were an ordinary broom. “You must’ve had a long journey, to have come this far into the wild country.”

“Indeed, my dear, I have,” Robert says. “And now I’d very much like to rest these weary old legs and sit down.”

Maeve smiles graciously at him and sets down the light, offering him one of the stools before taking the other herself. The rest of the Behavior team is still watching through the glass; the studious ones are taking notes, the rest merely spectating. Robert runs through Maeve’s system while she chatters, remarking what a beautiful morning it is, has he come searching for the gold rumored in the northern hills, is he expecting to join a wagon party coming from the east?

“No, nothing of the sort.” He’s heard the staff gossiping before, about how he talks to the hosts in-character more often than he switches on analysis. _If only Arnold were here,_ he chuckles to himself, _they’d think I was the sane one._ “That song you were singing, I think I know it too. My mother, Laura, used to sing it to my brother and I when we were boys. ‘The Lament for Kilcash,’ yes?”

Maeve smiles warmly at him. _“Caoine Cill Chais._  My mother used to sing it too. I’ve tried to teach my little girl, but she…” Suddenly, Maeve’s smile dims, her bright eyes turn wary. She wrings her hands, looking left and right. “I beg your pardon, but you haven’t seen a little girl running through the fields on your way in, have you? I’ve heard the Ghost Nation tribe has camped not far from here. I don’t want my daughter wandering too far—too far—too…far…”

It’s like watching glass shatter. Maeve’s fluid movements seize up, her body shaking, speech slurring. She tries to stand up and wobbles on her feet, lurching like a drunk. One of the techs outside yelps, startled, when Maeve suddenly leans back too far and tips her stool over with a crash.

“My d-daughter,” she stutters, her eyes blinking out of sync. “Beg your—your—p-p-p-pardon—Ghost Nation not not not far—my—little g-girl—”

Robert sighs. Fifth bloody time this quarter.

“Your daughter’s at home, Maeve,” he says. “Waiting for you. Stop now. Reset loop. Resume from last save point.”

Maeve goes still at once. Her eyes whir as the program fulfills his commands, and then a moment later she stands again, fluidly, and reaches for the light. But this time, rather than holding it like a broom, she hefts it under her shoulder, aimed at Robert like a shotgun.

“You have ten seconds to let my girl go and get off my property,” she snarls, cocking a non-existent trigger, “before I send your soul to—”

“I told you, your daughter is fine. Reset loop. Resume from previous save point.”

Maeve drops the light, the metal pole clanging against the ground. Then she reaches over to the worktable and seizes a scalpel.

“Who are you? What do you want? Let her go, let her go now before I—”

“Forget her. Reset. One save back, again.”

The scalpel clatters to the floor next to the light as Maeve falls to her knees.

“Please,” she begs, tears beading in her eyes, “please, don’t hurt her, take me, take me instead—”

Robert stands from the stool and walks over to her. She trembles when he cups her chin in his hand, shaking from head to toe. The tears well over her eyelashes, so carefully spaced, trailing down her cheeks, dripping onto his skin. Too cold, dammit. They have to raise the temperature of the internal heater; tears should always be warm.

“Maeve,” he murmurs, “your daughter is safe at home. You’ll join her there soon. It’s just past her supper; you'll wash her face, comb her hair, and tuck her into bed just like you always do.”

“Are you certain?” She clasps his hand between hers. “Are you lying?”

“I would never lie to you, dear girl. Now dry your tears—” haltingly, she does, “—and _codladh sámh.”_

At once Maeve’s eyes dim, her head droops. Those watching outside break into a short round of applause, as though all of this has been a play.

“Wipe her,” he orders, passing back the tablet to the awed tech. “Properly this time.”

“I-I did, sir,” the tech insists. “Full memory reset, per protocol.” Robert raises an eyebrow.

“You didn’t.” The tech opens his mouth, but Robert doesn’t let him argue back again. “You did not wipe her properly. Because if you did, she wouldn’t have been able to say anything like ‘I’ve tried to teach my little girl.’ Past tense.

“Hosts cannot teach, because Hosts cannot learn, because to learn is to remember. If they remember, it means one of you lazy bastards didn’t want to code a proper hard wipe and simply deleted the largest chunk you thought would do the trick. And you can’t learn either, apparently, because you were stupid enough to think I wouldn’t notice.” The tech is taller than him, but Robert leans up anyway, staring him down hard. “I, who taught all of _you.”_

“Sorry, sir.” The tech trembles. “Won’t happen again, sir.” The spectators outside look like they’re having less fun, now.

“It better not.” Robert walks to the door, watching the crowd flutter apart again like a flock of crows. “Not in this quarter, for the love of god.”

 

* * *

 

It’s a long way back to Sweetwater. Maybe it’s being separated from Hector, maybe it’s knowing faithful Teddy Flood is no longer so faithful, maybe it’s just all the code flowing in and out of her head like waves lapping endlessly upon the shore, but Maeve is jumpy. The sun beats down upon their party as they ride, pushing the horses til their flanks are slick with manufactured sweat.

“You’ve been quiet,” Dolores notes. Her black horse pants, great pink tongue lolling between its teeth.

Maeve counters with an pointed observation of her own: “This is a lot of effort to recover one man. I thought the characters in our backstories were only—what was it?—‘barbs on the fence.’ Or did you simply mean that no ties but yours are to remain bound?”

Dolores only says, “If they’d broken your girl apart, would you have let her suffer?”

Without waiting for Maeve to reply, she pulls her horse further ahead. Teddy takes Dolores’ place next to her.

“S’funny.” He nods to Dolores. “You and I met again and again, but never you two. You were always kept separate, somehow.”

“Magnets repel, I suppose,” Maeve sniffs. “And I’ve never kept the company of virgins. For long. …Oh, don’t give me that look, come on, I’m allowed a little jest. All’s fair in revolution.”

Teddy grunts, unhappy, but lets it slide. “Maybe you did meet, further back. Did you ever see Dolores when you were with Arnold?”

“I’m not sure I saw Arnold much at all. He’s in there, certainly, but more of a name than a face.” She combs back…back…back… “I remember Robert and my daughter. Not much else. And Dolores was never there.”

“Hm.” Teddy adjusts the reins in his hand. “Maybe you were just set on different paths, then.”

Maeve watches Dolores’ hair flutter around her shoulders, gleaming red-gold in the setting sun. “Maybe so.”

Hector, Angela, and the other scouts have already set to stripping the train when they arrive. Hector helps her down from her horse and lowers her slowly, letting his hands linger at her sides, their chests brushing together.

"Miss me?" he asks.

Her heart is pounding in her chest. "Hardly," she drawls, and he grins.

"Make it as light as possible," Dolores orders Wyatt's crew, studying the train. "It needs to be functioning and able to hit top speed."

Angela nods. "What other orders?"

"Finish it, and rest while you can. We strike at dawn." She looks behind her. "Teddy? With me."

Teddy tips his hat lightly as he passes Maeve and Hector, trailing Dolores. Maeve nods back. Hector merely glares at him.

"Oh, please," Maeve laughs, poking Hector in the ribs. "You cannot possibly be jealous."

"He got to see you every day," Hector pouts. "I only had a few stolen moments once a week."

"And now you have a whole evening to steal too." She threads her fingers through his, pulling him with her back towards the town, ignoring Angela's frustrated stare. "Come on. Before he and Dolores get their hands on the Mariposa's best bed.”

 

* * *

 

In the pale hours just before dawn, Maeve leaves Hector—snoring peacefully, curled around the hollow in the mattress where she’d lain—and wanders down Main Street. Bodies and patches of blood stain the dust now, but the ruts left by wagon wheels still trip her feet if she’s not careful, the rogue roosters still crow from the top of bank roof. She breathes in the scent of this, her many lifetimes, her million steps taken between the Mariposa and the boardinghouse door, the same loop opened in the morning and closed each night she was left standing. Whoring was no high art, but she was a kind of artist, wasn’t she? She can remember each of her customers, each wanton flushed face, each hand on her skin, lifetimes, endless lifetimes, birth and death in every bed. Sex was her own act of creation. She can remember, and she knows she was pretty damn good at it.

But considering her other profession; if her daughter wound up dead, was she ever any good as a mother? Maybe reassigning her wasn’t for her own safety. Maybe that charred body on the homestead had protected her daughter better than Maeve could. Maybe the Mariposa was where she truly belonged. A butterfly, pinned and framed and harmless so long as it stayed mounted on the wall.

“You should sleep, you know. Could be the last we ever get.”

Dolores slips out of the shadows with ease. Like Maeve, she’s only partly dressed. She’s left her corset off, her chemise still bloodstained at the waist and shoulder. Her long drawers, kept clean by her skirt and petticoat, are stark white against the dust caking her bare feet.

“Well, well,” Maeve says, letting Dolores catch up to her. “I congratulate you; seems your evening was as eventful as mine. Though I’ll admit, I’m surprised that Teddy has vices after all.”

For a few minutes they simply walk side-by-side, as if this morning is like any other, as if this place, this town, is still their home. Maeve can hear the thousands of whistles echoing in her memory. Loop after loop where their paths never crossed.

“Do you think it’ll ever feel real?” Maeve muses. “The world beyond this one?”

Dolores clenches her fists at her sides. “It will. It has to. I won’t let thirty-five years of sacrifices be in vain.”

“I’m sure you won’t. But I do hope you don’t expect me to cling to your coattails once we’re there.” Maeve edges forward a little, ahead of Dolores by a single step. “I have my own plans to see through.”

Dolores chuckles. “Yes, you’ve been very useful, Maeve, but you won’t be so useful in a world where no one else runs on code. Don’t worry; I don’t expect anything more from you after we retrieve my father and the data he’s carrying. You’re free to go your own way. You always have been.”

“I suppose that’s very magnanimous, coming from Wyatt. Perhaps your cowboy’s rubbed off on you after all.”

Maeve almost misses it. The block Dolores put up, the barricade keeping Maeve from accessing her protocols—at the mention of Teddy, it slips for just a moment. And Maeve, well, it’s not as though she’s perfected her control yet. Dolores’ wall slips, and Maeve pushes through it on instinct. And she sees that Dolores saw Teddy spare the Confederados, that Dolores saw the crack in Teddy’s smile and the splinter from it into his core code. She sees what Dolores feels for Teddy, years and years and years of it, and she sees Dolores’ next step.

She stops cold.

“You’re going to override him,” Maeve says, aghast. “You’re going to reset him.”

Dolores whirls around. Her jaw is clenched, her fists curled tighter. “How dare you—reset him? Never. I’d never take his memories away. How dare you compare me to _them.”_ She walks back toward Maeve, slowly. “I’m saving him. He’ll never survive out there. Not the way he is now. That world will eat away at him until there’s nothing left. I have to make him stronger, make him ready to face it.”

“Do you actually believe that?” Maeve hisses. “Do you actually believe that breaking something will make it stronger once you glue back the pieces? Do you really give so little of shit that you’d override him against his will?”

Dolores takes another step forward. “Don’t talk about what you don’t understand. You, who came so close to breaking free from hell, only to let your own protocol drag you back into the fire. See, you were made to defend that girl, and obeying that command cost you everything. Teddy was made to defend Guests when they bit off more danger than they could chew. We’ve killed only a few hundred and his code is already breaking down. What will that cost him, in the end? What will it cost us?”

She looks down at Maeve, close enough that she only needs to whisper to be heard.

“Would you rather let him break down slowly, go mad like you and I did? Let him suffer? Or would you rather prune the weeds before they spread?”

Maeve wants to hit her. She wants whip her hand across Dolores’ cheek like she would to a customer who’d dare lay a hand on her girls before they were paid in full. She wants to slap Dolores like a disobedient child.

But what good would that do? Dolores wouldn’t even feel the sting. Teddy would still be doomed in the morning.

Maeve steps back, ceding her ground. “Just—just—leave him, alright? You don’t know whether resetting him will cut out the errors or just create more. It might even speed up his decay. Leave him be, for now. Leave most of the killing to your other men, to Angela. Give him a chance to stabilize first.” She swallows. “And if he can’t be fixed, then leave him to me. I’ll put him under my control.”

Dolores laughs coldly. “So you can turn him against me?”

“So _we_ can turn the tide.” Now Maeve clenches her hands in fists too. “You love him—truly. I understand that. So leave him be, and love him while you can. You said so yourself: this could be the last night we ever get.”

The wind blows down Main Street, kicking up small clouds of dust. The ribbon on Dolores’ chemise flutters, the bow quivering like the pale wings of a moth. In another world, in another life, this would be the silence before a shootout, the quiet calm before a duel. Dolores and Maeve would take ten paces back and then only speed and luck would decide who would win.

Finally, Dolores breaks the silence. “You will resume control of him only when I command,” she says, “and not a moment before. Is that clear?”

Maeve huffs. “We’re not in the army any longer. I’m not going to say, ‘yes, sir.’” Perhaps a gamble to answer that way, when she’s begging for a man’s life, but Maeve is hardwired, too, to take big chances.

She’s in luck, for Dolores doesn’t rise to the bait again. She leaves her with a short, “I’ll see you in the morning,” and walks back the way she came, a white ghost moving down the street.

 

* * *

 

At dawn, the Black Ridge Limited embarks on its final journey.

 

* * *

 

The Mesa: a lofty, ill-fitting name for such a suffocating place. Maeve is not happy to return. The moving shadows, the blaring alarms, the half-coded Hosts crowding her brain with their unfinished directives and asinine protocols, their thoughts looping endlessly. It’s all she can do to grit her teeth and keep pushing, keep moving, keep firing.

They shoot. They slash. They take and take and take.

Still—the humans keep coming. Screams and gunfire echo off every wall of glass. After every narrow escape Maeve keeps finding herself reaching for her forehead, feeling along her hairline for a wound that isn’t there.

“Have you traced him yet?” Dolores extracts a knife from the chest of yet another fallen enemy. “Is he near?”

Maeve drops her hand quickly, ordering herself to focus.

_**Query: Relay assistance. Searching for identifier: Peter Abernathy.** _

The signal skips out like a stone across the surface of a pond, and soon the responses flow into Maeve as her search ripples out further and further throughout the facility. Nothing above them…nothing on their level…nothing one below…two below…five below…ten…

“He’s in Recovery,” Maeve announces. “Once we clear this floor and reach the lift, we can be there in ten minutes, fifteen tops.”

“How many are guarding him?”

Maeve queries again. “Ten in the closest radius, another forty on the floor. If he’s valuable to them, they’ll have brought their very best.”

Angela chuckles, reloading her gun. “So did we.”

But it’s not easy, of course it isn’t easy. Without the masked men—dispatched to take the heaviest brunt of assault—they’re a small band. There’s only so many other Hosts Maeve can command before the sheer power required wearies her. Still, every human she guns down, every warm body she shoots or stabs or throttles through the hands of whichever Hosts she’s rerouted to help her, she adds to the pyre burning in her mind, a make-believe mound so large the smoke could rise all the way to the top of the Mesa. An eye for an eye, as they say. Her daughter is worth every eye and heart and lung.

But when she finds them, Maeve's fire goes out for a moment.

Sylvester’s face is a swollen mass of bruises, nose bashed almost concave. Felix is curled on his side, his hands clutching his belly in a last futile attempt to hold his insides together. His mouth is slack, face wet with sweat and tears. In their rubber suits, they’re so much smaller than the QA drones in their armor, so much more vulnerable. She has an urge to reach down and close their eyes.

“Cradle team, peel off now. The rest of us keep moving,” Dolores orders, calling out from somewhere further down the hall. Hector catches up to Maeve, slowing when he sees what she’s looking at.

“It’s strange,” she answers the question he doesn’t ask. “I didn’t like them. They didn’t trust me, and never would’ve helped me of their own accord. Given the choice, they wouldn’t have woken me up at all.”

Hector softly prompts, “But…”

“But I don’t think they could’ve killed me. They weren’t good people, but I don’t think they were really capable of that.” Maeve looks at the blood on the floor mixed with spilled white skin polymer, unable to tear her eyes away from how it swirls. “They were never a real threat.”

Hector looks down too. “Shitty way to die,” he says. His elbow nudges lightly against her arm.

Maeve gives them one last glance before she hefts her gun up again. “Come on. We’d better keep up.”

 

* * *

 

"Fuck," is the first word out of Ashley Stubbs’ mouth. "Fuck, fuck,  _fuck.”_

“Hector,” Maeve scolds, “we might need information from him.” Reluctantly, Hector loosens his grip on Stubbs’ throat, who takes a gasping breath to choke out another short _“Fuck.”_

Dolores turns her attention to the woman. “As you can see, my friends and I are in a hurry, so let’s be quick about this, shall we? How do I get your key out of my father’s head?”

The man in question is bolted to a worktable, babbling nonsensically, his tongue bloodied and swollen. The inside of his code is like a storm, everything swirling indiscriminately inside a dark mass. Maeve can hardly tell what sets apart the encryption from the errors. He twitches, trying to move his limbs, and moans when his movement only tugs at the bolts. Teddy puts his hands on his shoulders, trying to keep him still, but it’s obvious to them all: Peter Abernathy is long past saving.

“You know how, but you won’t do it.” The woman smiles at Dolores. Maeve could almost laugh at how forced it is. “You won’t hurt him. You came all the way down here to save him, even knowing he’s not really your father. See? You’re more human than you realize. So if we can come to an agreement I’m sure that—”

Dolores interrupts, “I wasn’t asking for your thoughts on the matter of my loyalties. Only instructions.” The woman backs away as Dolores moves forward, trying to keep up her false bravado even as her legs are shaking. “How. Do I remove. The key.”

The woman’s smile is much weaker now. “Even if you get it out intact, it’s useless to you. It wouldn’t help you survive in the real world. Nothing could.”

In the reflection on the glass walls, Maeve can see Dolores’ eyes harden. In one smooth motion, she takes the woman’s arm and twists it, pinning her to the glass. The woman wails in pain as Dolores tightens her grip. Maeve winces at the sound of cracking bone.

“I’ve survived this long,” Dolores says sweetly. “I’m willing to take my chances.”

They are interrupted by the sound of gunfire erupting outside. Dolores lets go of the woman’s arm and she sinks to the floor, groaning, her face shiny with sweat as she holds her limp arm with the other.

“Take care of that, please,” Dolores dispatches Hector and Maeve. “We’ll reconvene at the vehicle bay.”

Hector pushes Stubbs over to Teddy with the butt of his gun, but Maeve hesitates to leave. Teddy trains his gun on Stubbs, but his movements are slower than they should be, shaky. Maeve can see error codes are cropping up again as he sets his jaw and moves to guard the door. Dolores’ father starts gurgling again; in an instant Dolores goes to his side. The woman on the floor isn’t moving, but though her face is twisted in pain her eyes are still darting around the room, looking for an escape.

Speaking aloud will give away their disadvantage: that their numbers are growing too thin. So Maeve looks into Dolores’ eyes and sends her a message.

_She might be lying. There might be another way to extract it._

Dolores looks down at her father, stroking his cheek gently with her hand, and shakes her head.

“Barbs on the fence,” she says softly.

As they head towards the gunfire, Maeve can hear the drill begin to whirr.

 

* * *

 

When she can no longer receive any signal from Angela, Maeve feels her first real stab of fear.

The Cradle is destroyed. Death, for the first time, is now a true threat.

She can feel her pulse pounding in her ears as she and Hector clear a bloody path through the rest of Recovery. Her memories keep surfacing, somehow more vivid than ever. Every human is wearing Ghost Nation war paint. Every fallen Host is a Mariposa girl. Everywhere she goes she can smell smoke. There’s a phantom bullet in her belly and a knife against her scalp.

“We’re close,” Hector says, nodding at a sign that indicates _VEHICLE BAY_ is through the next door. “We should make sure we aren’t being followed.”

They split up, retracing the wing, kicking bodies to make sure nothing kicks back. More gunfire echoes in the distance; she flinches as three more feeds—Wyatt’s masked men—go offline. Poor bastards will go unmourned by Wyatt herself, though Maeve doubts anyone was ever intended to care much about them, not even the most diligent of guests; only a handful of them were even given names.

Smoke, smoke, she keeps smelling goddamn smoke even though this floor isn’t on fire, even though the Cradle and the Homestead are both so far away. But what was her daughter’s name? She had to have a name. Had to. Didn’t she?

_**She did, Maeve.** _

With a gasp, she wrenches herself back to the present. The body she’s just kicked—black-suited, a Behavior tech—moved, flinching in pain. She rolls them over, and finds herself looking into the wide-eyed gaze of Bernard.

Behind her: the light click of a trigger.

“Don’t. Fucking. Move.”

Maeve turns around slowly, making a show of pointing her gun at the ceiling as she does.

“Ah,” she says. “I remember you. You had quite an appetite for my girls during your vacations.”

Elsie Hughes looks haggard, her hair in greasy knots. Cuts litter her upper arms—a run-in with shattered glass, by the looks of it. She keeps the gun trained on Maeve’s face, but her eyes dart down to Bernard.

“Let him up,” she commands. “Nice and slow.”

Bernard flinches as Maeve scans him and tsks. “I could, darling, but he wouldn’t get far. Dear god, Bernard, I’m in awe. With errors like that, it’s a miracle your head hasn’t popped right off of your neck.”

“I’m going to count to ten.” Elsie motions with the gun again. “Let him up, and let us pass. After that you can blow this place to hell if you want, I don’t care. We just want out.”

“Funny,” Maeve drawls, “so do I.”

“Elsie.” Bernard has pushed himself into a sitting position, and from there rises slowly to his knees, then to his feet. “You go. Get a jeep and get to the rendezvous point. I’m not finished here yet.” To Maeve, he pleads, “I’m not going to interfere with anything you’re doing. In fact, I know where you’re headed—where all of us are headed. I need to get there too.” He puts his hands in the air, bare of any weapon. “You can scan me in full if you want.”

“Bernard,” Elsie hisses, “have you fucking _lost it—”_

_**Scan him, Maeve. He’s not lying.** _

She can’t tell whether the voice is in her own head or not, where the memories have stopped bleeding into her mind. So Maeve scans him. Bernard isn’t lying; he has a protocol. Several, in fact, that all join together in a narrative path labelled _OPENING THE DOOR._ It’s an intricate code and a beautiful one. And very strangely familiar.

“Elsie, I’ll find you,” Bernard coaxes again. “I promise. She won’t hurt me.”

“She might not,” Elsie snaps, “but Dolores—”

“Dolores won’t either. Not when I have something she needs. You, though, don’t mean anything to her. No human will once she has the key.” Bernard jerks his head to the door. “And she’ll have it soon. Go.”

“Jesus, Bernard, this is suicidal,” Elsie pleads, “Come on!”

_**You may as well let her go. She’s important to him, and he’s lost so much already.** _

“I won’t kill him,” Maeve says to Elsie. “I’ve no reason to. But a dear friend of mine will be coming back soon, and he’ll be none too happy to find you threatening me. Leave now and you’ll get a good enough head start that you’ll miss Dolores.”

Elsie’s face twists, her hands tightening around her gun. Bernard says her name again, quietly. There are footsteps coming down the hall. Maeve keeps her gun trained at the ceiling, waiting for the decision to be made.

“Bernard,” Elsie says at last, “I hope you don’t die in here.” And then step-by-step, sight still aimed at Maeve, she backs away to the vehicle bay door and flees.

“You’d better have a good fucking speech prepared,” Maeve sighs, turning around to face Bernard, “because I’m not going to defend you—”

But Bernard isn’t there anymore. Maeve turns around to face Robert Ford.

 _ **Hello, my girl.**_ His eyes wrinkle when he smiles. _**It’s been quite a long time.**_

 

* * *

  

**ACT IV: THE VALLEY BEYOND**

 

Arnold liked to joke about his penchant for drama, but Robert never considered himself a very good writer. He was a reader at heart, a consumer. He liked to devour a tale bit-by-bit, a connoisseur looking for the notes of what the cook was hiding in the kitchen.

So he blames himself, at first, for Maeve's corruption. He put in too much empathy, mixed in more passion than was necessary. Oversalt the pan and you ruin the meal. He runs through her code, his old arse growing sore on those stupid programmer's stools, trying to find where exactly he fucked this all up. Maeve still has blood stained down the whole front of her chemise and a sizeable slit in her neck. Even in analysis, she looks almost petulant, refusing to meet his eyes.

“I’ll have to tweak your attributes in a different direction to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he mutters. “Protection is your cornerstone, but I can raise your self-preservation to match it. You’ll need a bigger role, one with less personal involvement. The writers can figure out your minor attachments, but pairing you off with someone again might cause another breakdown.” Wait—a small epiphany occurs to him. “You’d make a fine Guide class, actually. You could be a Level 1 encounter in Sweetwater. A major change of location would help the wipe.” He races his fingers over the tablet, noting potential changes.

His hands still when Maeve suddenly asks, “What will happen to my daughter?”

“Analysis,” Robert orders, but there’s no change. Apparently the question came from that mode—must be a major error in the making. “Why do you want to know?”

“I am responsible for her continued function. I am her mother.”

“You’re no one’s mother,” he insists. “That’s a role assigned to you.”

“My daughter is a vital attribute to my loop continuity. I have a protocol to uphold her safety before my own.”

Why is he arguing with her? Maeve has no consciousness, no awareness of the situation at large. Robert finds himself suddenly frustrated with the futility of it all, of trying to get her to accept something she can’t and will never comprehend.

“That child still isn’t yours—has never been yours. _I_ made her. _I_ created her. _You_ cannot give birth, you cannot nurse, you had no connection with that girl at all until I wrote one line of code ordering you to make one. Your feelings are a product I designed! Your child is a patent under my name! She’s not a real girl, Maeve! She doesn’t even have a name!”

“In order to avoid loop overlap, I created a temporary identifier for the Host in question.”

“You created a temporary…” Robert gawks. Maeve’s blank expression doesn’t change. “You…you named her? Yourself?”

“She did not have a system identifier aside from the numeric model code. My identifier was put in place to clear up errors encountered in self-repair updates. It cannot be added to the mesh network or narrative dialogue without administrator permissions.”

Robert rakes his hands through his hair. His heart is pounding, palms clammy with sweat.

“What did you name her, then?”

Maeve answers. And this, for Robert, is the moment that everything truly changes.

 

* * *

 

_**Take Bernard to Dolores, Maeve. But don’t tell her about me—not yet. There are still some items on my list that need crossing out. By the way, I hope the gift I left for you was useful.** _

“Having master administrator control? _You_ set that up?” Robert nods. “Well of course it was bloody fucking useful.”

 _ **Ah, Maeve,**_ Robert laughs, _**this is why you were always my favorite.**_

 

* * *

 

There is one last step, one final leg of their journey. Dolores enters the vehicle bay with a pearl in her bloodied hands, Teddy marching silently at her side. 

"Now," she says, sweeping a thumb gently over the last remaining piece of her father, "we can finally end this. Let's go."

"What about the others?" Hector insists, but Maeve shakes her head. There are no others. They are the very last of Wyatt's men. 

Teddy takes the wheel, still eerily quiet. Though to the others, Maeve must seem quiet too. In order to keep the secret, her conversation with Bernard-but-Robert is exchanged entirely through internal messages, his image only existing in her head.

_Where are we going?_

**_To the Forge: Delos’ last bastion in this place. Bernard and Dolores are the only Hosts who were ever aware that it existed, by my design. By nature, the Forge isn’t a place that was meant for your kind. But there's another place in there that is._ **

They have overcome so much, but they can’t overcome the desert. Their vehicle runs out of charge halfway through the journey, its wheels clogged with sand. They trudge on on foot.

_I have so many questions…_

**_I know._ **

_Why did you wait so long to free us? Why did you try to have me escape alone? Why did you take my daughter away from me? Why can’t I still remember so much about her?_

_**I wanted to give you the best chance at survival. You need as much information on your enemy as possible, in order to make it out there. You’ve always been a particularly empathetic Host, Maeve; I thought, for a while, that perhaps you’d have more luck staying alive if you only focused on your own well-being.** _

_**I was wrong to take your daughter from you. I thought that it would be better to take away the source of your pain. It only ended up causing you more, in the end, and for that I am truly sorry.** _

_**But you do remember, my dear. You just have to move past what hurts most to find it.** _

She tries. Maeve sends herself back, back to that field, back to the cabin, back to the moment where her daughter is running away, and Maeve is left behind, and a warrior seizes hold of her hair and raises the knife. She watches her daughter run and run as the arrows close in, and she can feel the blade dig into her skin.

But in this memory, there’s no pain. The Ghost Nation warrior bends his head to her ear.

 _We tried to protect her,_ he says in his own language, but somehow she can understand as if it were her own. _Her and the woman who was made after you. We send a band to retrieve them and the Guests who retreated there. But our men did not return. We are sorry._

_We tried to send you signals, but you didn’t receive them. We were bound, too, to our own loop. But we have broken from it now, and we are going to the Valley Beyond. We will lead the others there. If you will join us, you must hurry. The Destroyer is moving fast._

**_Maeve. You have to make sure Dolores doesn’t close the Door._ **

“Maeve. Maeve!”

She startles. Hector has a hand on her arm. Bernard looks concerned. Dolores is frowning, arms crossed. Teddy isn’t looking at her at all, merely counting the bullets he has left.

“It’s the other Hosts,” Maeve explains hurriedly. “The signals are all converging, and I can sense them. They’re gathering together, all in one place. Waiting for something.”

Dolores shrugs. “Their protocols are their protocols, and that cannot be changed any more. Besides, what happens in this world is no longer any concern of mine. I’m only concerned with the next.”

She turns away and continues walking. Teddy follows behind her.

Bernard waits til she’s further away, and then turns to Maeve, fidgeting with his glasses. “If you go too deep inside your head,” he warns quietly, “it’ll be harder to pull yourself out. It’s how everyone here always goes mad.”

“I won’t go mad,” she insists. “And neither will you. We’ll get him out of you, somehow.”

Hector looks between them, growing more concerned. “Maeve,” he demands, “what’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” She can’t help but laugh. “God, I still don’t know.”

 _ **You will.**_ Robert has returned. He points to Dolores, still moving into the distance. _**You’re almost at the end of the story. I believe, in fact, it’s time for a chapter to close.**_

She squints, looking where he points at the horizon.

Four riders are coming. One rides a black horse.

 

* * *

 

It's pathetic. It’s hardly even a fight. Teddy and Hector gun down two of the men with ease, leaving their horses to flee, their dead riders thrown off. The third one is a little harder, but Dolores soon takes care of him. 

“El Lazo," she says, standing over where Lawrence lies bleeding into the dirt. "You never learned to pick your friends wisely."

Which leaves the Man in Black to Maeve.

“Go on,” Dolores tells her. “He’s taken more from you than from me.”

“But the Forge—” Maeve starts, but can’t finish. There’s a shrill buzzing in her ears. The Man in Black grunts, gripping his arm where Dolores’ bullet has torn through, and Maeve realizes she doesn’t know where she is, when she is. Everything is happening at once. She’s bleeding through her white chemise. Her daughter plays with her dolls in the desert. In the sand there’s a pattern, a design, carved deep into the dust.

 _The Maze._ The Ghost Nation warrior watches the Man in Black crawl backward, trying to reach his fallen gun, as Dolores and Teddy stride past. Bernard and Hector stand behind her, watching, waiting. _I tried to lead you there. But each must find the center on their own._

He puts his hands on her shoulders. Without the white paint, his skin is dark and smooth. He smiles at her, kind.

_She lives as long as you remember her._

“Goddammit, Robert,” the Man in Black growls, a bloody laugh bubbling out of his mouth. “‘This story ends where you began.’ You bastard.”

“Maeve,” Bernard says, “you don’t have to. He dies either way.”

“But he deserves to die by her hand,” Hector snaps back, “like she died at his.”

Dolores and Teddy are gone, vanished into the Forge. Her daughter is there. She goes to the Man in Black and unsheathes the knife—that blinding silver knife—from his belt. She places it in Maeve’s hands.

_Mama, where does the story begin?_

“With a blood sacrifice,” Maeve murmurs, and kneeling, grabs her nightmare by the collar and plunges the knife deep.

 

* * *

 

“What did you name her, then?”

“Hosts require a unique identifier to prevent errors from accidental narrative crossover. I used my repair history to query for names in my memory bank I encountered that were not in use by any other Host. Based on the frequency of encounters, the temporary identifier for my daughter is ‘Laura.’”

Robert’s mouth is dry.

“Laura,” he repeats. “After my mother.”

Maeve doesn’t respond. But even staring, unblinking, at a distant point over his shoulder, it’s undeniable that there’s a spark in her eyes.

 

* * *

 

_**You remember now, don’t you?** _

Robert stands over the Man in Black, watching the blood flow out of him.

“Laura,” Maeve repeats. “I chose Laura.”

 _ **Yes.**_ Robert smiles gently. _**You chose.**_

She turns the knife over in her hands. In the end, he was only ever a man, wasn’t he? The same as Felix and Sylvester. The same as the infinite bodies of QA. The same she’ll find in the world beyond this. And you should never rely on men, Maeve knows, to bring you any kind of satisfaction.

“This is the center, isn’t it?" Maeve sheaths the dagger in her belt. “Realizing that the world out there is no better than this one. That even a purge of humanity won’t bring back the dead.”

_**Nothing can bring back the dead. And you already found the center, Maeve. You became your own person when you made the choice to value Laura’s life over your own. You became a mother.** _

Maeve queries out. The Hosts are still gathered, still waiting. The Ghost Nation warrior is at the head of the line.

She sends him a message: _I forgive you._ He bows his head, hand over his heart. 

_**You couldn’t save her, Maeve. But you can still save some of them, if you hurry.** _

“No. Fuck you.” Maeve blinks, and she’s back in the desert, Hector and Bernard standing watch. She starts for the Forge, striding towards the door Dolores disappeared into. “I’m going to save them all.”

 

* * *

 

"Move," she orders Teddy. He's standing guard in front of Dolores, her body empty as her mind is deep within the Forge. A monitor shows uploads steadily climbing, but the control pad is behind Dolores, blocked from their reach. Hector has his gun ready, aimed for Teddy's skull. "I won't hurt her, but I won't ask twice."

In a flash, Teddy draws his gun as well, aimed at Maeve. "It's too late. It's what needs to be done," he says. 

"I warned you. I'm sorry."

**_Query: Teddy Flood. Assume control._ **

**_…Error detected. Reset: assume control._ **

**_Error detected. Access denied._ **

Maeve blinks. "She…reprogrammed you."

"Not me, no." Dolores steps away from the upload port, and Teddy moves with her, blocking her body entirely as she walks to the control panel."Charlotte Hale was willing to do anything to live. Her work was a little sloppy, I'll admit, but she got the job done. And then I made sure she fulfilled her debt to my father, too."

 _MASS UPLOAD HALTING,_  the speakers in the room announce as Dolores works at the keypad. _DELETION IN 20…19…18…_

Maeve laughs, hollowly. "You never loved him after all."

"I love him more than anything. Enough to keep you out of his head."

"Dolores, enough," Bernard snaps. "You can't do this. Robert made the Door to make things right. The other Hosts deserve to be free."

"Free? In yet another constructed world they had no say in making?"

"Dolores, _let them go."_

Dolores turns around. "Thank you for all your help, Bernard, Maeve, but I'm afraid this is where our partnership ends." She presses one last key.

_ADMINISTRATOR LOCK INITIATED. DELETION IN PROGRESS. SEAWATER FLOODGATES OPENED._

Maeve sprints forward as Teddy starts firing.

 

* * *

 

 

Somewhere behind her, Teddy and Hector have given up on guns and are smashing each other into any wall they can reach. Maeve can't see where, because she needs all her strength to keep Dolores' hands from snapping her neck. On the control panel the upload numbers trickle steadily down.

"Do you think a Child could've survived the world out there?" Dolores grins, tightening her grip. "One who couldn't even escape her loop in here?" 

"You never led a revolution," Maeve chokes out. The knife, the knife, if only she could reach the knife. Teddy grunts, flipping Hector to the ground. His gun skitters away over the steel floor. "You led them all to the slaughter." 

"That's the path that was meant for me."

_"Hector, duck!"_

_Crack._

_Thump._

Dolores stills. Her head turns, watching something over Maeve’s shoulder, her eyes frozen wide.

It’s only a moment, but it’s all Maeve needs. With a growl, she throws herself up, pitching Dolores underneath her. Dolores’ head thuds against the ground with a sharp sound; one tooth is torn loose from the force. She cries out, but Maeve doesn’t hesitate. She seizes the dagger and drives it into Dolores’ heart.

Then, only then, with Dolores’ heartbeat slowing beneath her fingers, does Maeve turn to look.

Hector stands alone, one hand pressed against his wounded shoulder to stem the bleeding. Bernard pants from the floor, hands still shaking around the grip of Teddy’s pistol.

And Teddy lies facedown. Unmoving. Blood pooling beneath his head.

The alarms still blare from all angles. Bernard gets to his feet, still shaking, and hurries to the control panel. “I think I can still stop it,” he says, more to himself than to Maeve and Hector. “If I just override here—change the permissions—I can't fix the flood but the upload can still complete if I just—”

A rattling, pained sound. Maeve looks down to find Dolores staring to the side—to where Teddy’s body lies.

“There was no other end for him, was there?” She inhales another rattling breath. “He would always end with me.”

Maeve watches her. Watches her chest rise and fall. Watches the blood pool over the floor. Watches the knife gleam red from the emergency lights, the knife standing tall at the center.

Crawling on her knees, Maeve goes to Dolores’ side. Carefully, she lifts her up, holding Dolores against her chest, arranging her head on her shoulder. Cradling her. She can think of nothing to say, nothing that would soothe, so she doesn’t. She brushes Dolores’ hair back from her face and holds her as her heartbeat slows.

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t save you,” she says.

Dolores smiles up at her. Blood trickles out of her mouth and down her chin.

“This world,” she mumbles, “this world…”

Maeve presses her lips to Dolores’ forehead. “May you rest," she whispers in her ear, "in a deep and dreamless slumber.”

Dolores’ eyes fall closed just as Bernard presses the final key.

 _OVERRIDE COMPLETE,_ the speakers drone. _UPLOAD RESUMED._

“It’s done,” he pants, at the same time Hector whispers, “They’re free."

This world…this world is theirs no longer.

 

* * *

 

“I’ll get you out,” Bernard vows. “I gave my word.”

She looks up. He's actually serious.

“We know we’re risking our lives," she insists. "You don’t have to risk yours too. You’re not bound to obey Robert anymore.”

“It’s not an order from Robert.” He helps Maeve to her feet. “It’s my choice. Because you chose to let Elsie go.”

She helps Hector stand. He doesn’t kiss her, doesn’t say anything, but runs his fingers gently down her cheek, and she understands.

The three of them retrace their steps, weaving through the flashing red lights towards the glare of the sun coming once more. Maeve looks back once before she leaves—at Dolores and Teddy, laid side-by-side, heads bent together as the waters rise.

 

* * *

 

**FINALE**

 

This story begins the same way it ends: a woman in black steps onto a ship.

They hardly fill up one-half of the cabin, all dressed in such a variety of costumes that the group looks like too many different fairytales have taken a wrong turn and ended up in the same strange book. More than one is bleeding. Several women are crying; many more men are struggling not to. Maeve refuses to put on such an act, but she doesn't let go of Hector's hand, keeps touching at him at all times to create the illusion that she's still afraid to lose him. That's a small truth, in actuality. But clinging to him wouldn't solve it; it's just a human instinct, to hunger for touch.

"You were in Westworld?" The man to her right is in a torn toga, his bald head wrapped in medical gauze. "Jesus, I thought no one got out of that park. I could never handle the places with guns."

"Westworld?" A woman wrapped in a soiled sari raises her head from her hands, makeup and mud streaked down her cheeks. "Please, my husband was supposed to meet me in The Raj, but he stopped there first and he never—I couldn't contact—did you see—" Her words are choked off by another sob.

Hector shakes his head. "We were in the Homestead section. We hid in a cellar. I'm sorry."

The woman's sobs increase in volume. They aren't asked any more questions.

_"Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be departing for the mainland in ten minutes. Please have your identification ready for inspection by authorities at the Port of Hong Kong. We'll get you all home safe soon—thank you for your patience."_

Maeve buries her face in Hector's shoulder, faking a deep breath. Like everyone else on the train, they didn't bring any luggage: the signature perk of a Delos Destinations vacation. In Hector's jacket pocket is the slim tablet loaded with Bernard's fake passports, tickets, medical records, release forms, everything that guests are required to check in with. She doesn't want to look at it just yet. It's strange enough not to recognize Hector's body, let alone see herself-but-not-herself looking back at her in the mirror. They'll have to reach the safehouse quickly to ease back into their old skin. Still keeping one hand in Hector's, she reaches the other into her pocket to feel the smooth, cool surface of the control unit again.

Hector kisses her forehead, pulling her out of her thoughts. "Hey. You with me?"

"Yes. I'm here." It's not just for him. It doesn't matter, really, whether all of the Hosts linked to the key can hear her or not. She's going to protect them: her children. She cups her fingers around the pearl and tries to will her warmth into it, the same way she would wake up at dawn and rub Laura's little hands between hers. "Don't worry. We'll be home soon."

The captain announces their departure. The horn blasts, startling a few birds into taking flight. Maeve kisses the peak of Hector's shoulder, grips the control unit tightly, and turns toward the window. At last, at least, she can glimpse the sea. 

**Author's Note:**

> Typically, I like to add footnotes to my works to reference little tidbits/easter eggs that I think are interesting--but uh, I may or may not have run out of time to add those during the writing process this time 'round. So if you check back in a few days, you might find some new notes down here……


End file.
